My mother nicknamed me Dee when I was born, and the name seriously stuck. Not only do all of the friends I grew up with still call me Dee, but all of the kids I work with at the nature center know me as “Ms. Dee”.

In addition to this obviously superlative call, chickadees are also incredibly brave little birds, a trait that I both admire and aspire to.

At just 4.5 and 5.5 inches from beak to tail, respectively – we get both Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis) and black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) here and I’ve spent exactly zero time learning to tell them apart, which I’m surprisingly okay with – they are among the smallest of the common songbirds. So, you might expect them to be shy or timid, but the opposite is true.

This black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) was photographed by Minette Layne and provided via Wikimedia Commons. The guide books note that the black-capped has buff colored sides whereas the Carolina chickadee’s sides are all very light gray. I must take my fancy new binocs up to my feeder watching chair and see if I can tell which visit my feeder.

They’re often first to the backyard feeder, happy to claim their place among the bigger birds and, seemingly, much less bothered by humans.

Early, early, early in my love affair with birds, I perched upon a stump on the rocky banks of our six by four foot backyard fish pond. One tiny chickadee flew in from the woods outside the fence up to the seed filled feeder off our second story deck. How brave he seemed daring a stopover with me sitting so close below. Then, years later, I watched from the kitchen, the room on the other side of that sundeck. Another chickadee sat on the barbecue grill beneath the same feeder–as if he were frozen. He stayed like that for five long minutes. The only part of him to waver was his eyeballs which occasionally shifted upwards. Surely it must be that our resident red shouldered hawk was soaring too near. Chickadees! Delicate balls of fluff on the outside; sturdy, stalwart stuff on the in. Not a bad being with which to share a moniker, Dee.